Today's Expositor's Quote is another from John Piper's fine book, The Supremacy of God in Preaching:

How utterly dependent we are on the Holy Spirit in the work of preaching! All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You wake up on Sunday morning and you can smell the smoke of hell on one side and feel the crisp breezes of heaven on the other. You go to your study and look down at your pitiful manuscript, and you kneel down and cry, "God, this is so weak! Who do I think I am? What audacity to think that in three hours my words will be the odor of death to death and the fragrance of life to life (2 Cor 2:16). My God, who is sufficient for these things?" . . .

The dangers of self-reliance and self-exaltation in the ministry of preaching are so insidious that God will strike us if he must in order to break us of our self-assurance and the casual use of our professional techniques.

John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, Baker, 1990, p. 37-38.

[Do you feel desperate before preaching? There is a fine yet vital line of difference between entering the pulpit confident that you have a message from God that He will pour forth, and entering confident in your own ability and preparation. May we all remember, whether we are preaching our 1st sermon or our 1001st, that apart from Him we can do nothing -- Coty]